The running joke around here about Kris Bryant – aka, the best minor league player in baseball – is that he could do everything … except hit a triple. All those homers this year, and not one triple. Clearly, the Cubs were just waiting until he showed the ability to triple before promoting him.

Well …

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Ok. He’s ready.

I kid, of course, as Bryant is not going to be coming up this year. The front office has said as much repeatedly, and you can probably look for Bryant to come up in late April next year and be up for good. (There remains a small chance that he’ll break camp with the big league team, and the organization will decide to forgo locking up that extra year of control. I wouldn’t be a fan of that approach as I sit here today, but you have to remain flexible. And, let’s be honest: Bryant is looking like a guy who could legitimately be worth an entire extra win by himself in those 20 April days. Maybe that win winds up meaning a whole lot next year.)

The triple, for the record, was Bryant’s third overall in his minor league career.

There’s a lot I love about that video, by the way. First, Bryant crushes that ball. Pretty much anywhere else, it’s not just a homer, but a looooong homer. It banged off the upper part of the wall bearing a 425 sign. So, yeah, it was a bomb. Despite the fact that it was a bomb off the bat, Bryant was clearly booking it out of the box. When the ball only briefly got away from the center fielder, I thought there was no way that was going for three bases. Bryant has decent speed, but not so much speed that he could have made up for a slow trot to first. He must have been running hard immediately – on a ball that went 425 feet.

On the year now, Bryant’s line remains a head-shakingly good .328/.438/.674. I think it’s safe to say that, at least in the minors, that’s about his true talent level. Which is absolutely nuts.

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